Poverty

Many people told me before I came here that India is a wonderful place if you can get past the devastating poverty. After having seen some of this poverty firsthand, and after hearing several lectures from professors here, I’ll share my thoughts on this matter.

First of all, there is a saying here that India is a land of contradiction: for anything you say about India, the opposite is also true. So I will make the disclaimer here (perhaps I should have started this blog with this) that it is difficult to generalize.

Well let me start with some statistics. India has a population of roughly 1.3 billion. That’s 4 times the population of the US living in a land 1/3 the size. To get an idea of the density of people here, for every person you see (in the US), pretend there are twelve! Now the real mind-blowing statistic is that ¼ of this population lives on less than $1 a day, and ¾ of the population lives on less than $2 a day.

There are really two Indias, living right on top of each other. There is rich India, which in almost all respects is as advanced as any developed nation in the world. This ~7% of the population is well-educated and enjoys all the latest technology.

Globalization has of course had a large impact on India. The very high growth (>9%) that India has experienced is largely attributed to globalization—including the outsourcing of jobs from the developed world. But if one looks at the Indian population as a whole, this growth has been focused narrowly on the top 20% or so of the population.

The poor (and often uneducated) are largely left behind. For example, individuals working in the agricultural sector of India, where somewhere around 60% of the population works, have arguably suffered from globalization. The news here has focused recently on farmer suicides, of which over 1000 have occurred last year. Globalization causes the farmers to be at the mercy of volatile swings in prices that are out of their control. For example, an exceptional cotton crop in South America may cause an Indian cotton farmer to earn a fraction of his income the previous year.

In my opinion, what is lacking here is an adequate safety net provided by the government. This is very little trickle down across the vast chasm of rich and poor. Furthermore, grade school is not mandatory here, and government school teachers are terribly paid (and they often shirk their responsibilities). Add to this a strongly present (though not legally enforceable) caste system, and there is little-to-no opportunity for socio-economic movement.